Our Mission
At Illumidine Corporation, we're illuminating the dining and cooking experience. We're making dining and cooking more enjoyable and entertaining, as well as educational and informative. Illumidine® is simplifying nutrition tracking for health-conscious adults, hospitals, and healthcare providers, and we're making "eating your vegetables" fun and educational for children. One focus is the last bite of the food chain, where the food hits the table...the human-food interface (HFI), if you will. We're developing innovative products for the Internet of Things, but at Illumidine, IoT stands for the Internet of Tableware™.
Our Story
Illumidine Corporation is the proud creator of illuminated, sensing, and WiFi-connected smart dining and cookware products. Illumidine's flagship product is SmartDish®. SmartDish is a hardware and software system that includes a dining dish providing a multimedia and food-sensing dining experience, complete with light and sound, wirelessly controlled by an app on your mobile device.
Illumidine's family of illuminated and sensing dining dishes, drinking cups, utensils, and other WiFi-connected smart dining and cookware products is protected by one or more of the following 13 issued United States and international patents: US7163311B2, US8672504B2, US9737173B2, US9782027B2, US10085598B2, US10881249B2, US11375853B2, CN101128861B, CN104083048B, JP5523672B2, JP6200823B2, Macau J / 1535, and Macau J / 3165. Additional patents are pending worldwide.
Meet the Team
James Kramer, Ph.D.
Founder & CEO
James founded Illumidine Corporation to pursue his vision of illuminating the dining and cooking experience to be educational, informative, and fun.
Prior to Illumidine, James founded two other companies. The first company, Virtual Technologies, Inc. (VTi), was one of the pioneering Virtual-Reality (VR) companies in the 1990s. VTi's award-winning CyberGlove® product was based on a hand-sensing glove James invented for his doctoral dissertation. The CyberGlove was featured on the cover of the first virtual reality magazine. VTi was acquired by Immersion Corporation (Ticker: IMMR).
After VTi, James co-founded Hoozware, Inc. Hoozware created one of the early location-based mobile apps. The app provided mobile coupons for restaurants and pubs, and also displayed real-time demographics and information about events at the venues. After launching the mobile app in San Francisco, Hoozware's extensive IP was acquired by Groupon (Ticker: GRPN).
James earned a bachelor degree in mechanical engineering, and he received masters and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, focusing on smart-product design. For his doctoral dissertation he invented the TalkingGlove™. The TalkingGlove is a glove with sensors for measuring finger movements, and a novel neural network to convert fingerspelling into speech, to assist non-speaking deaf and deaf-blind persons to communicate more easily with hearing people.
James is a prolific inventor, and has over 80 issued patents and applications worldwide covering a wide range of inventions.
James was a collegiate competitive swimmer, and enjoys skiing, tennis and softball.